Towards three o'clock in the afternoon of one October day in the year 1844, a man of sixty orthereabouts, whom anybody might have credited with more than his actual age, was walking alongthe Boulevard des Italiens with his head bent down, as if he were tracking some one. There was asmug expression about the mouth-he looked like a merchant who has just done a good stroke ofbusiness, or a bachelor emerging from a boudoir in the best of humors with himself; and in Paristhis is the highest degree of self-satisfaction ever registered by a human countenance.As soon as the elderly person appeared in the distance, a smile broke out over the faces of thefrequenters of the boulevard, who daily, from their chairs, watch the passers-by, and indulge in theagreeable pastime of analyzing them. That smile is peculiar to Parisians; it says so many things-ironical, quizzical, pitying; but nothing save the rarest of human curiosities can summon that look ofinterest to the faces of Parisians, sated as they are with every possible sight.A saying recorded of Hyacinthe, an actor celebrated for his repartees, will explain thearchaeological value of the old gentleman, and the smile repeated like an echo by all eyes. Somebodyonce asked Hyacinthe where the hats were made that set the house in a roar as soon as he appeared."I don't have them made," he said; "I keep them!" So also among the million actors who make upthe great troupe of Paris, there are unconscious Hyacinthes who "keep" all the absurd freaks ofvanished fashions upon their backs; and the apparition of some bygone decade will startle you intolaughter as you walk the streets in bitterness of soul over the treason of one who was your friend inthe past.In some respects the passer-by adhered so faithfully to the fashions of the year 1806, that he wasnot so much a burlesque caricature as a reproduction of the Empire period. To an observer, accuracy of detail in a revival of this sort is extremely valuable, but accuracy of detail, to be properlyappreciated, demands the critical attention of an expert flaneur; while the man in the street who raisesa laugh as soon as he comes in sight is bound to be one of those outrageous exhibitions which stareyou in the face, as the saying goes, and produce the kind of effect which an actor tries to secure forthe success of his entry. The elderly person, a thin, spare man, wore a nut-brown spencer over a coatof uncertain green, with white metal buttons. A man in a spencer in the year 1844! it was as ifNapoleon himself had vouchsafed to come to life again for a couple of hours